Mexican/migrant Mothers and 'Anchor Babies" in Anti-Immigration Discourses: Meanings of

109 Pages·2017·0.69 MB·English

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Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses
Studies
Spring 5-7-2013
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Margaret E. Franz
Georgia State University
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/wsi_theses
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Franz, Margaret E., "Mexican/migrant Mothers and 'Anchor Babies" in Anti-Immigration Discourses:
Meanings of Citizenship and Illegality in the United States." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2013.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/4050109
This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information,
please contact [email protected].
MEXICAN/MIGRANT MOTHERS AND ‘ANCHOR BABIES’ IN ANTI-IMMIGRATION DISCOURSES: MEANINGS
OF CITIZENSHIP AND ILLEGALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

by

MARGARET FRANZ

Under the Direction of Dr. Amira Jarmakani

ABSTRACT
The right wing anti-immigration movement’s recent surge in racial panic and paranoia concerning the
specter of the overly fertile Mexican migrant mother and her US-born child points to a discursive
struggle over the meaning of citizenship and illegality. Starting from the assumption that both
citizenship and illegality are highly contested and fluid political and moral categories, this project
examines how white supremacist and heteronormative ideologies and political emotions like love and
fear construct both Mexican migrants and their children as “illegal,” while simultaneously shrinking the
meaning and enactment of citizenship for everyone. I argue that citizens of Mexican descent are
racialized and sexualized as “illegal,” in order to warrant their exclusion, though not their expulsion,
from the biopolitical fold of the nation-state.

INDEX WORDS: Migration, Sexual citizenship, Illegality, Political emotions, Biopolitics
MEXICAN/MIGRANT MOTHERS AND ‘ANCHOR BABIES’ IN ANTI-IMMIGRATION DISCOURSES: MEANINGS
OF CITIZENSHIP AND ILLEGALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

by

MARGARET FRANZ

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in the College of Arts and Sciences
Georgia State University
2013
Copyright by
Margaret Franz
2013
MEXICAN/MIGRANT MOTHERS AND ‘ANCHOR BABIES’ IN ANTI-IMMIGRATION DISCOURSES: MEANINGS
OF CITIZENSHIP AND ILLEGALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

by

MARGARET FRANZ

Committee Chair: Dr. Amira Jarmakani

Committee: Dr. Susan Talburt
Dr. Julie Kubala

Electronic Version Approved:

Office of Graduate Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
Georgia State University
May 2013
iv

DEDICATION
To Rogelio Cervantes Catalan and Lauren Altagracia Cervantes
v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the emotional and intellectual support of
everyone at the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I would especially like to thank
my mentor, advisor, and thesis chair Dr. Amira Jarmakani, whose friendship and intellectual support
made this project possible. I also sincerely thank my committee members and teachers Dr. Julie Kubala,
Dr. Susan Talburt, and Dr. Megan Sinnott for their guidance. I am thankful to everyone who made the
10th floor of Urban Life the best place to be in Atlanta: Alex Venegas-Steele, Lucas Power, Nikki White,
Sherah Faulkner, Scott Nesbitt, Ashleigh Riley, Taryn Jordan, Hannah Carswell, Lamont Loyd-Sims,
Andrea Miller, Andy Reisinger, and Tahereh Aghdasifar. I thank Travis Giebler for his friendship and for
endlessly listening to me anguish over my thesis. I would also like to thank my Blue Moon friends,
especially Mary Betsill and Eduardo Martinez, for taking me in when I had no home. I also thank fellow
Blue Moonies Sergio Guerrero and Rogelio Rico for informing me about the political climate in Georgia,
which subsequently led me to my thesis. Lastly, though certainly not least, I would like to thank my
family and friends in North Carolina, especially my sister Joanna, whose love, humor, and support made
moving to Atlanta (and then several times within Atlanta) much easier.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................................... v
1 INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1
1.1 Review of Literature ............................................................................................................6
1.2 Methods ........................................................................................................................... 23
2 SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED .................................................................................................... 29
2.1 (Bio)Paranoia, Biopolitics, and Degeneracy in the “Anchor Baby” Discourse ........................ 31
2.2 Constructing Spectacles of Fear: The “Illegal Alien” and the “Anchor Baby” as Human
Monsters ..................................................................................................................................... 38
2.3 The Inheritance of Degeneracy .......................................................................................... 48
2.4 Conclusion: The Expansion of Illegality ............................................................................... 52
3 THE WILL TO LOVE: JUS SOLI AND LIBERAL CONSENT ................................................................. 55
3.1 “Subject to Jurisdiction”: The Politics of Love, Monogamy, and Value ................................. 60
3.2 Jus Soli Citizenship and the Consent of Kinship ................................................................... 69
3.3 Conclusion: Love, Fear, and the Limits of Exception ............................................................ 73
4 EPILOGUE ................................................................................................................................... 80
REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................... 83
NOTES ............................................................................................................................................. 89
1
1 INTRODUCTION
In December of 2011, the “anchor baby” discourse erupted when The American Heritage
Dictionary added the term to its annual compilation of new colloquialisms. Through its deployment in
anti-immigration discourses, the term “anchor baby” has come to connote the citizen-child of an
“illegal” migrant mother who presumably uses her child’s citizenship status to stay in the country,
sponsor family members, and take advantage of the state’s welfare system.1 Architects of the “anchor
baby” discourse like Samuel Huntington describe the allure of having a citizen-child as a ‘magnet’ that
motivates Mexican women to migrate “not because they are attracted to America’s culture and Creed,
but because they are attracted by government social welfare and affirmative action programs.”2
Therefore, not surprisingly, the political and semantic weight of the term, as well as its addition to the
dictionary as a non-pejorative noun, prompted an uproar from immigrants’ rights organizations like
Immigration Impact who demanded that The American Heritage Dictionary label the term ‘pejorative’ or
at least a product of right-wing fantasy.3 However, once the dictionary finally did label the term
offensive, rightwing commentators chastised the editors for ceding to ‘liberal media’ and not
recognizing that the word describes a ‘real problem.’ For example, in response to the revision, Fox News
Online writer and communications specialist for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
Bob Dane wrote, “the offensive aspect of ‘anchor baby’ isn’t the term itself, but the practice of having
children on U.S. soil for the sheer purpose of gaming the system.”4 In other words, the central issue of
its addition to the dictionary and its subsequent revision is whether the ‘problem’ that the word
connotes is based in reality or fantasy. This project takes up this concern, examining not whether
“anchor babies” are in fact real or not, nor whether ‘they’ constitute a problem, but instead examining
how the “anchor baby” and his or her “illegal” Mexican/migrant mother are discursively constructed as
both real and threatening to the US.
2
Due to the perceived reality and threat of the “anchor baby,” the rightwing pundits and
politicians who use the word also advocate for the restriction of birthright citizenship by reinterpreting
the 14th Amendment in order to end the “anchor baby loophole” as Patrick Buchanan and John Tanton
call it.5 Advocates for reinterpreting the 14th Amendment cite Yale Law professor Peter Schuck’s
argument that the Amendment’s original drafters only intended to grant birthright citizenship to the
children of freed slaves, not to every future baby born in the US.6 Schuck and his followers also argue
that undocumented migrants are not “under the jurisdiction” of the US government, and thus, their US-
born children should be considered citizens of the parent’s native country like children born to
diplomats.7 Lastly, Schuck and his followers argue that granting citizenship to the children of
undocumented migrants deprives the “American people” of consenting to the citizenry of the US, which
results in “a loss of control over the nation’s future.”8 Therefore, the “anchor baby” discourse can be
easily conceptualized as a moral panic, since it constructs a largely phantasmagoric threat followed by
the call to regulate the threat by reinterpreting the amendment.9
Though the moral panic concerning “anchor babies” is hardly new, the mainstreaming of both
the term and its politics is a relatively recent development in the US’s long history of anti-immigrant
politics. Although the term and its accompanying discursive construction of problematic Mexican
migrant reproduction had been around for more than a decade prior to its addition to the American
Heritage Dictionary, it was used primarily in relatively small rightwing media outlets (i.e., V-DARE) and
had little circulation in mainstream public discourse.10 However, the increasing popularity of
conservative news websites and the contentious political rhetoric accompanying the passage of anti-
immigration legislation in states such as Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama incited what media scholar Gabe
Ignatow terms an “’anchor baby’ boom” around the year 2010, which has remained fairly steady.11 He
defines the “’anchor baby’ boom” as the exponential increase in the use of the phrase “anchor baby” by
mainstream news sources, demonstrating that the ‘fringe’ has had considerable influence on at least the